Can you use couchDB for web apps like ebay?

Question

I mean, can you use couchDB for:

• CRUD of items, users
• bids and auctions resolutions
• bidirectional califications
• forum
• items comparison

Answer 1

You could try to use CouchDB for an application - as to whether you would be successful is another question.

Something on the scale of eBay will have special requirements that are not representative of a typical application, If you are building a small auction site then perhaps CouchDB would suffice. A document-oriented database like CouchDB may not be so hot when you have to deal with transactional/records-based data like that associated with auctions.

Answer 2

I would look to see how Amazon uses SimpleDB internally (or do they?). Might have some clues as to right ways to use a document-based database.

Answer 3

I think couchdb would be excellent for part of the problem, though there are a few elements that would not be great. Particularly, eventual consistency over distributed nodes seems really bad for real time bidding.

You could keep the the item and user info in CouchDB, along with forums and a lot of that sort of stuff, but some functionality (bid tracking, search) would be more suited to other backends. As an example, the CouchDB guys are looking at tying CouchDB into other tools (like SOLR) for indexing, etc.

Answer 4

As you can see here they are indeed using non-relational approach, so I guess you're heading in a correct direction (flexibility-wise at least).